The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War

By Michael S. Sherry

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime," and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies. Michael S. Sherry argues that, by the 1990s, the "war on crime" had been successfully broadcast to millions of Americans at an enormous cost--to those arrested, imprisoned, or killed and to the social fabric of the nation--and that the currents of vengeance that ran through the punitive turn, underwriting torture at home and abroad, found a new voice with the election of Donald J. Trump. By 2020, the connections between war-fighting and crime-fighting remained powerful, evident in campaigns against undocumented immigrants and the militarized police response to the nationwide uprisings after George Floyd's murder. Stoked by "forever war," the punitive turn endured even as it met fiercer resistance.

From the racist system of mass incarceration and the militarization of criminal justice to gated communities, public schools patrolled by police, and armies of private security, Sherry chronicles the United States' slide into becoming a meaner, punishment-obsessed nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469660714

Michael S. Sherry

Michael S. Sherry is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University.

Book preview

The Punitive Turn in American Life

The Punitive Turn in American Life

How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War

Michael S. Sherry

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Richard Hendel

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The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustration: special ops police officer by Getmilitaryphotos, shutterstock.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sherry, Michael S., 1945– author.

Title: The punitive turn in American life : how the United States learned to fight crime like a war / Michael S. Sherry.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020026484 | ISBN 9781469660707 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469660714 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Criminal justice, Administration of—Political aspects— United States—History—20th century. | Criminal justice, Administration of— Political aspects—United States—History—21st century. | Punishment. | Militarization. | Intelligence service—United States.

Classification: LCC HV9950 .S547 2020 | DDC 364.973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026484

Contents

Introduction

1 The Crisis of a Militarized Order, 1963–1969

LBJ and the Punitive Turn

Before LBJ

From Uniform to Uniform

Militarization from Below

2 War on Crime in Vietnam’s Wake, 1969–1973

Nixon’s Crime Politics

The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal

Nixon’s (Not-So) Winning War against Crime

Soldiers to Cops

3 The Uncertain Advance of the Punitive Turn, 1974–1981

Gerald Ford, Forgotten Promoter

Toward a Punitive State

Jimmy Carter, Outlier

Sex, Children, Evil

Crime Cultures

4 The Triumph of Militarized Crime-Fighting, 1981–1993

Reagan’s New War

Spreading the Word

Beyond the White House: These Guys Get into the Real Shit

Bush, Punisher in Chief

5 The Sprawling Punitive Turn, 1993–2001

Clinton, the Artful Policeman

Superpredators and Much More

The Punitive Turn in Culture

How Bases Became Prisons

The Call of Vengeance

6 The Punitive Turn in an Age of Vengeance, 2001–2009

American Vengeance Goes Global

War-Fighting or Crime-Fighting?

Torture in Two Silos

7 Reversal or Redirection? 2009–2017

Push and Pull

The Limits of Resistance

The Twilight of War Talk

Epilogue: The Enduring Punitive Turn

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

A gallery of illustrations begins on page 127.

The Punitive Turn in American Life

Introduction

Advertisements urging civilians to buy guns suggest how the punitive turn had played out by the 2010s. As Close as You Can Get without Enlisting—that is, get to war—stated one rifle ad, while another ad promoted a semiautomatic shotgun with the slogan Iraq Afghanistan, Your Livingroom, and a handgun ad pictured an infantryman above the words BUILT FOR THEM . . . BUILT FOR YOU.¹ The message: Americans at home could carry the same weapons of war that soldiers carried in battle. Many Americans believed, or at least were asked to imagine, that the line between war-fighting and crime-fighting had almost disappeared. This book is about how that happened.

The title of this work, The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War, captures the sweeping process, starting in the 1960s, that moved punishment and surveillance to the center of American life and imbued them with militarized language and practices. Its obvious forms were mass incarceration, as the United States became the world’s foremost jailer, and the militarization of policing, as critics called it. But the punitive turn also encompassed other practices—public schools entered through metal detectors and patrolled by police, gated communities shooing away the unwanted, cameras peering to catch red-light offenders, armies of private police, familiar rituals of airport screening, and fads like the child-spanking movement. Scholars often refer to the carceral state. The punitive turn in American life, a phrase I first used in 2005,² signals a broader process that included what the state did but went beyond it.

The punitive turn faced countercurrents—it did not move forward inexorably and uniformly. As a result of authorities’ indifference, court rulings, or legislative action, some acts once deemed criminal no longer were: most abortions after Roe v. Wade in 1973, and sodomy between adults later on. Military conscription, certainly a coercive system and to some draftees a punitive one, ended in 1973, and the death penalty faced persistent and partially successful opposition. These countercurrents churned the waters but did not halt the onrushing tide, at least until the 2010s. The punitive turn made America a meaner, punishment-obsessed nation, with vengeance at home and abroad its ruling impulse. And it made the United States a more distinctive nation, as it departed from norms in comparable countries.

What caused the punitive turn in American life? Scholars, pundits, and, on occasion, politicians have offered many explanations, most centered on race, class, economics, and the state. This book seeks not to supplant those explanations but to add to them, locating another engine driving the punitive turn—the nation’s messy entanglement of war-fighting with crime-fighting. No great historical shift has a single cause, but a major cause of the punitive turn was the Vietnam-era crisis in the militarized order that had dominated the nation and disciplined its youth since the late 1930s. Under that order, the United States had harnessed industry, science, people, and propaganda to amass world-destroying weapons in its efforts to defeat Axis enemies in World War II, contain communism during the Cold War, justify an expansive state, and sustain its global hegemony. As the U.S. war in Vietnam faltered, that order frayed, and the state’s legitimacy came into question.

In response, political leaders embarked on a war on crime in order to reassert that legitimacy, to preserve their power, and to quell the era’s disorder, starting a process whereby resources devoted to war and national security were partly redeployed to wage war on crime, to use the term that became commonplace. Redeployment was often halting, improvised, half intended. But when President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed on September 22, 1965, that the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime, the process was starting.³ By then, an already substantial apparatus of law enforcement and a powerful apparatus of national security allowed the state to act vigorously in criminal justice and to do so on militarized terms. Soon, the waning of America’s war in Vietnam created a surplus of war-making capacity—people, institutions, machines, words—that was recycled into crime-fighting. As the Vietnam War raged, responses to crime got encased in the language and institutions of war making. Political leaders worked to rebuild a state under siege on the basis of a new punitive order, one that borrowed from an older militarized way of life.

That process was hardly alone in causing the punitive turn. But it was consequential, it overlapped other sources of the punitive turn, and it was a causal force that Americans long overlooked. Over several decades, Johnson and others reconstructed the old militarized order and rebuilt the state on a new foundation of crime-fighting. No one political faction, ideology, institution, leader, or vested interest made that project happen. Most Americans were complicit in it or oblivious to it, and those keen to resist were often powerless to do so. But all were not equally culpable. Political leaders and institutions—presidents, Congress, state legislatures, and so forth—bore the most culpability. Americans did not en masse demand the punitive turn. Leaders and institutions led them into it.

Many Americans considered crime-fighting to be like war-fighting because of long-standing political habits and the immediate circumstances of the 1960s. Their nation had gone to war often, by some measures almost continuously. Americans had often regarded national problems as warranting a warlike response because war seemed like the mechanism that had most purposefully organized the nation and the state. President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, had cast the nation’s response to the Great Depression as a warlike effort, saying at his first inaugural that he might need to respond as if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe, and the New Deal modeled some of its efforts on World War I’s institutional apparatus. The bigger the wars, the stronger that habit in their wake. After World War I, and even more so after World War II, countless proposed national programs were analogized to wartime efforts like the atom bomb–building Manhattan Project or built on their apparatus.⁴ Less successful wars after 1945 complicated exercise of that habit without stopping it.

But customs are not automatic; they intersect with circumstances. In the 1960s, they intersected with still-powerful memories of World War II, with the war in Vietnam, and with rising racial conflict and crime at home. For President Johnson and many others, war, World War II in particular, provided the template for national action on many fronts. The language of war arose easily, almost reflexively, as these Americans confronted poverty, disease, social conflict—and crime. But the conditions of the 1960s, above all a floundering U.S. war in Southeast Asia, made that intersection especially fraught. The state slowly steered the institutions and modes of war toward crime-fighting. But the era’s analogies of crime-fighting to war-fighting were so numerous, conflicting, and explosive that the nation’s punitive turn was at its start both energetic and uncertain.

This book tells a story hardly unknown in its particulars but hidden in plain sight overall. Many people know that war talk enveloped late twentieth-century campaigns against crime, especially in the war on drugs. But few scholars do more than note the presence of such talk, failing to map its emergence and tenacity, its twists and turns.⁵ As the punitive turn accelerated, apparent lines between spheres of action—war-fighting and crime-fighting, the military and the civilian— faded in political rhetoric and institutional practice. A robust and persistent language of war on crime enmeshed the two spheres. The blurring of lines encountered little opposition, even though shrill presidential rhetoric often revealed it, because war and crime tapped similar fears and ambitions, overlapped institutionally, and served similar purposes. To move from a war on foreign foes to a war on domestic ones did not seem like a big shift. Likewise, the phrase war on crime—often waged on those deemed criminals—seemed natural enough to Lyndon Johnson and the scores of others who came to use such phrasing.

The narrative spine of this book is the public rhetoric and record of presidents and other high officials, but much branches out from that spine, since those officials hardly did it all. Unlike the most analogous realms, defense and foreign policy, for which authority was centralized, crime policy was scattered among many local, state, and national authorities. Even at the federal level, jurisdiction splintered among many agencies, and Congress and the courts played powerful roles. And initiatives often arose at the local level and in the marketplace with little or no presidential awareness.

Yet presidents were hardly impotent. Indeed, one trajectory in the punitive turn was the ascending role of the presidency and the federal government in crime-fighting. With the punitive turn, presidents from Lyndon Johnson on (Jimmy Carter was the exception) often set the tone and got their way. Dividing the story by presidencies is an old-fashioned way to write history, and many developments in the punitive turn spilled beyond the confines of any one administration, as readers will see. But that organization highlights what much scholarship neglects—the revealing role of presidents. Even when they were not prime movers, their words provided a major lens through which Americans understood criminal justice and punitive practice. And for presidents, crime was not just a national story but a supercharged local one of crime and violence in Washington, D.C., right under their noses. Given that the federal government had jurisdiction over that city that it lacked elsewhere, these leaders could not ignore how the local intersected the national.

Presidents’ roles differed. Johnson’s initiation of the punitive turn, chapter 1 suggests, was caught up in the convulsive politics of war and race in the 1960s. His efforts featured the first sustained exposition of war-on-crime rhetoric, with policies roughly to match. Richard Nixon, chapter 2 shows, echoed LBJ’s rhetoric in a mean-spirited but less sustained fashion, and to less consequence than is often credited to him. Gerald Ford, chapter 3 indicates, provided a robust ideological framework for a state rebuilt on crime-fighting. However, he had little chance to implement that framework, and even less given resistance to the punitive turn by his successor, Jimmy Carter

Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, detailed in chapter 4, offered a concerted, ugly, and consequential punitive conservatism saturated with the words and mentalities of war-fighting. Setting aside those words, Bill Clinton, chapter 5 argues, offered a softer language of prevention that obscured the militarization of American criminal justice. Responding to the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, as chapter 6 lays out, further exposed the currents of vengeance long coursing through the punitive turn.

Pushed by many activist and legal forces, Barack Obama, chapter 7 suggests, resisted the punitive turn but did so cautiously and with limited success. Donald J. Trump, sketched in the epilogue, embraced the currents of vengeance viciously even as he faced the strongest resistance to the punitive turn yet seen. These presidents and other leaders effected no conspiracy to enact a punitive turn, which is a story of unplanned and contingent shifts in political culture. Nonetheless, step by step (with a few steps backward), they helped to advance it.

Most people believe that changes in punitive systems are driven by public attitudes—by the waxing and waning of fears of crime and tough-on-crime sentiments. Many crimes inflicted real horror and pain: the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the murder of seventeen people in 1966 by ex-marine Charles Whitman shooting from atop a tower at the University of Texas, and the Manson murders in 1969, as well as unparalleled urban violence, right-wing and left-wing terrorism, and much else. But the atrocity of crimes and the overall crime rate did not alone drive the punitive turn. Horrible lawlessness occurs in many eras without producing a large-scale punitive response. (Who remembers the Bath, Michigan, school bombing in 1927, which took forty-four lives and may still be the deadliest school massacre in American history?) Changes in criminal justice correlated loosely with public fears, and sometimes not at all, and public figures provoked fear of crime as much as they responded to it. What drove the punitive turn was not just the horror of lawbreaking, but the responses to it of state authorities, politicians, the media, and others in a position to interpret the horror. Crime and fear of it were hardly the only forces at work.

Critics and scholars have argued that the punitive turn was a project of racial control that replaced a system of overt racism with a nominally color-blind one of law and order. As Michelle Alexander explains, In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. . . . We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.⁶ This book connects that dimension of the punitive turn to other currents flowing through it. In America, criminal justice is always about race, and never only about that.

And law and order was not the only color-blind language. Apparently, the loud, sustained language of war was also color-blind, even as it carried thinly coded racial meanings, especially in the war on drugs. War is never just an abstract, neutral term for the clash of armies or nations. In the United States in the late twentieth century, the word had cultural and racial valences. The nation’s deadliest war, the Civil War, had been about race, and had been waged in part by African Americans. Much of the nation’s war making had been against nonwhite enemies. And the term war on crime rose to prominence in the mid-1960s amid racial upheaval and at the peak of America’s war against another nonwhite foe. Not everyone who bandied about such terms intended them to carry a racial charge. But the ostensibly race-neutral language of war also cloaked the racial assumptions and animus often undergirding the project of those supporting a war on crime. The language of war, like that of law and order, had a powerful undertow of racial meanings.

This book is more about connections, associations, and feedback loops than causation, which is harder for historians to prove than many admit. The connections between war-fighting and crime-fighting were numerous, dense, charged, and ever evolving. They helped drive the punitive turn and give it its character. These connections’ persistence and ubiquity were as striking as their content. I trace the language of war that presidents, officials, police, arms peddlers, and others used. That language took many forms. Sometimes it involved a simple metaphor like war on drugs. Often it involved analogies and comparisons—for example, cops on the beat were like soldiers in war. And sometimes it was meant literally. In turn, that language propelled the use of warlike institutions and practices in crime-fighting. Thus, language lay at the top of a slippery slope down to practice.

Insofar as Americans saw fighting war as a model for fighting crime, not just as a breezy metaphor, their adoption of the war-fighting model implied a shrugging acceptance of the risks that combat entails: collateral damage to bystanders, danger to warriors as well as their targets, erosion of civil liberties and constitutional procedures, secrecy and deception, wasteful expenditures, abuse of enemies, distrust of those who resist the cause. Americans entered their war on crime having experienced such risks in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and in the threat of nuclear war. They were accustomed to such dangers, in part because they fell heaviest on others beyond their shores. Risks like these were so woven into the fabric of Americans’ historical experience that few questioned their reappearance in a war on crime. This was especially the case since the dangers of a war on crime were less obvious than those of a real war, creeping into consciousness and practice without the terrifying suddenness of Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attacks. It was easy to analogize crime-fighting to war-fighting.

Measured against the full run of American history, the punitive turn may seem less distinctive, only a new version of old patterns. After all, what was slavery if not a disciplinary system? And there was much else that fell into this category: the killing of Native Americans and their forced removal to reservations; the violent repression of workers by state and private authorities; the cruelties of Jim Crow and lynching for African Americans, with similar systems for Hispanic and Asian Americans; the mass repression during World War I of those deemed insufficiently loyal to the American cause; the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II; the confinement of hundreds of thousands in mental health facilities. And that is only a short list. Was the United States a more punitive nation in 1990 than it had been in 1890 or 1790? Perhaps not. Yet even new versions of old patterns deserve explanation. In American history, punishment is ever present but hardly unvarying, and there was nothing in that earlier history quite like the rhetoric and practice of the war on crime late in the twentieth century. Moreover, people usually understand their times in reference to a recent past, not a distant one. By that standard, the United States of 1990 was a much more punitive nation than it had been in 1950.

This book is not a comprehensive history of the punitive turn, which was too vast and long-lasting for one study to encompass. Instead, this book offers a selective, sometimes idiosyncratic take on the words and practices that illustrate how war-fighting and crime-fighting intersected, crossed paths, collided, or more often blended together. Readers will know other words and practices, especially regarding the high-tech dimensions of criminal justice, that I have neglected. By the same token, this book engages others’ scholarship selectively.⁷ For primary sources, it relies on published materials, some obvious and some obscure. At a few points, it digs into archival sources. Sections on cultural representations of criminals, victims, cops, and lawyers suggest how the punitive turn slowly spread into many facets of American life beyond the formal workings of criminal justice.

This work is an exercise in the history of political culture, thus differing in methods, aims, and style from much scholarship in the social sciences and political history on mass incarceration, the carceral state, and other aspects of the punitive turn. By and large, this study does not refute that scholarship. It instead offers a complementary way to explain the punitive turn, one focused on the language, institutions, and politics of war. As such, the book is a provocation designed to open a fresh way to think about the punitive turn rather than to offer the final say on it.

The emotive dimension of the punitive turn—ugly demands for vengeance (kill the bitch in reference to Hillary Clinton during and after the 2016 presidential campaign), visceral hatreds, racist furies, indignant cries of injustice—is one I only partially account for. I do, however, show how presidents and others voiced that dimension or gave others license to do so, and how that aspect of the punitive turn was often linked to the emotive thinking and language that war usually entails. Long living in the shadow of war, as I phrased it in an earlier book,⁸ Americans learned how to make substance of that shadow among themselves.

As I write this and you read this, the punitive turn continues to spill forward and splatter its harm widely. It does not seem destined to end soon.

Readers will find it useful to understand how I use key words and phrases. I place the word war and phrases like war on crime and war on drugs in quotation marks when quoting the words of historical actors or when referring to the aforesaid phrases as metaphors and dominant terms. Otherwise I use those words and phrases without quotation marks. Doing so risks appearing to normalize the phenomena involved, as if there were an actual war on crime, not a metaphorical one. But readers will see that is not my intent.

1: The Crisis of a Militarized Order, 1963–1969

Blame it on President Lyndon Johnson, among others.¹ In 1965 LBJ declared war on crime, and in his usual way of making extravagant promises that often backfired, he pledged not only to reduce crime but to banish it.² He did much to start the punitive turn and to shape its nature. Because his crime-fighting efforts carried an aura of liberal social uplift and got lost in the sea of his many other initiatives and failures, they gained him little credit at the time from law-and- order types, little attention for a long time from scholars, and little blame from critics of American criminal justice.³ But his administration did help start the punitive turn in response to the Vietnam-era disruption of a militarized order, thereby enmeshing it in the attitudes and institutions of war.

Johnson hardly intended to create the massive punitive system that soon emerged, a development so incremental that almost no one foresaw it, much less advocated it, in the 1960s. But he was as instrumental in that development as law-and-order luminaries like Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon. True, LBJ sometimes disavowed responsibility—he had no choice but to sign the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, he told Doris Kearns, explaining, Nixon has forced me into it by all the election bullshit blaming the Democrats for crime in the streets.⁴ But his reluctance to sign that bill can be misleading. Johnson was a vigorous proponent of new crime-fighting efforts, and he saw crime as warranting war against it. In tying crime-fighting and war-fighting so closely, LBJ helped set the punitive turn in motion, redirecting the state from war abroad to war at home. Liberalism, at least some strands of it, was as responsible for the punitive turn as conservatism. Liberals had a deep association with war, not because they loved it but because the midcentury peak of liberalism coincided with the midcentury peak of American war-making, which often underwrote the liberal state. They shared responsibility for the river of words, images, weapons, and personnel of war that flowed into crime-fighting. It is the place to begin this story.

This chapter locates the start of the punitive turn in the embrace by Johnson and others of war’s rhetoric and institutions, and in their ability to draw on the midcentury buildup of those institutions, which provided state capacity that could be turned to crime-fighting. As such, this chapter differs from other explanations of Johnson-era crime politics that seldom mention either that embrace or the Vietnam War context of crime politics in the 1960s and 1970s.

LBJ and the Punitive Turn

The pressures within and beyond the Johnson administration to tackle crime were numerous, big, and volatile. Rising crime rates—as always, more malleable and subjective than almost anyone admitted, and partly the product of more systematic reporting—were the most obvious concern. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), violent crime rose 11 percent from 1965 to 1966, and 165 percent between 1965 and 1975. In addition, the national homicide rate doubled between the mid-1960s and early 1970s and soared even more in some big cities.⁵ Crime rates would have registered even higher had they reflected the illegal acts of racist southern sheriffs and police, scared National Guardsmen patrolling campuses and cities, angry cops unloading sticks and guns, and urban red squads and federal agents snooping on and provoking violence by alleged radicals. But such people were rarely arrested, much less convicted, barely leaving a trace in crime statistics. At least as unsettling to people in power like LBJ, more and more prison inmates, especially black ones organized by the Nation of Islam, were rebelling or taking legal action against their treatment.⁶

In 1966, the young expert James Q. Wilson, later to champion a crackdown on crime and to influence presidents and crime policy for decades, assayed the statistics skeptically. Stating that he had found as yet no good evidence to justify the assertion that American society is becoming more criminal or less moral, he also suggested, "We are . . . less likely to commit a truly serious crime today than twenty or thirty years ago. Far from going to hell in a handbasket, he added, we are a long way from hell, and in fact may not even be in that particular handbasket. Wilson did speculate that the middle classes might be now consuming more crime, even though our society, as a whole, may be said to be producing less. And he warned that crime can become the major domestic issue of the far right, replacing ‘communist subversion’ and even ‘socialism.’ Unless liberalism addresses crime, he declared, it will become a notable victim of crime in the streets. But like many experts, Wilson attributed rising crime to the huge baby-boom cohort of the 1960s, given that younger people are more prone to crime: What appears to be a crime explosion may in fact be a population explosion."⁷

Moreover, in some categories like murder and robbery, crime rates only rose above their historically low levels in the 1950s, reflecting the periodic fluctuations such rates always experience rather than a march into unknown territory. Indeed, the rising crime rates of the 1960s might have attracted little attention by themselves—absent, that is, the political disorder, urban uprisings, racial conflict, and antiwar protest of the period (which, to be sure, contributed to the crime statistics).

But crime rates never exist by themselves, and the public voices of politicians and law enforcement leaders rarely acknowledged demography or the other complexities Wilson examined. A spike in public fears of crime seemed obvious at the time. Increasing anxiety was measurable in an explosion of fear of crime stories . . . easily traced to around 1965, and more tentatively in public opinion polls. But pollsters’ leading questions (do you agree that Law and Order has broken down in this country?) did as much to provoke fear as to measure it, and crime did not ascend to a major place in polling until 1968. Even then, recorded concerns over the Vietnam War far outpaced concerns about crime.⁸

Indeed, over the long haul politicians and other elites nurtured public fear of crime more than they responded to it, much like they led rather than followed public opinion preceding America’s entry into many of its wars. One LBJ biographer postulated a national desire for substantive and symbolic responses to the country’s growing lawlessness. However, that desire was more conjured than palpable—in the early stages of its construction, as scholars like to put it.⁹

Americans’ desire for crime control was hardly uniform or stable across class, racial, and other lines, and it was certainly less pronounced late in the LBJ years than a national desire to end (one way or another) America’s war in Vietnam. As Marie Gottschalk stresses, It is misleading to portray the public as overwhelmingly punitive, and the widespread impression that public concern about crime skyrocketed in the 1960s . . . is not solidly supported. Indeed, it was only in the mid-1990s that the public began to identify crime as a leading problem. Americans did not focus on crime as a goad to leaders’ initiatives; rather, they pinpointed the issue in reaction to how leaders had harped on it for decades. Political scientist Peter K. Enns has challenged those formulations, arguing that politically motivated elites have been marching in step with the mass public.¹⁰ But it is more accurate to say that in the 1960s politicians tried to make hay out of crime, and they did so with only mixed success (it did Goldwater little good in the 1964 election).

Still, the social production of fear—the claim that fear was rampant—surged at mid-decade, even if the grassroots reality of fear was less evident. And beyond crime of a familiar sort, urban riots, campus conflicts, antiwar agitation, black militancy, youthful rebelliousness, pornography, and godlessness added to a generalized sense of social disorder for numerous Americans. In response, many whites sought to throttle African Americans for their violence or simply for their assertion of equality. This distinction was rarely clear to many white Americans, for whom policing had a deep antiblack history. ("The first real organized policing systems in America arguably began in the South with slave patrols," argues Radley Balko.)¹¹ Much crime was committed by whites intimidating or terrorizing blacks—by Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama police, for example—although most public debate framed the aggressors’ actions as an issue of civil rights rather than criminality.

Most worrisome to Johnson and those around him, their political enemies seemed to gain traction by lambasting crime and blaming it on the liberalism of the ruling Democrats and key judges (especially Chief Justice Earl Warren, though he was a Republican nominated by President Dwight Eisenhower). As president, Eisenhower had made little public mention of crime. President John Kennedy had not discussed the matter much more, except for organized crime and race relations. But law and order moved to center stage in Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, assisted by former president Eisenhower’s denunciation that year of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who was roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearms seeking a prey.¹² Lawbreaking was also emphasized in state and local races, including Ronald Reagan’s successful campaign to become California’s governor in 1966, and independent Wallace’s and Republican Nixon’s presidential campaigns in 1968. The crime issue plausibly accounted for Nixon’s tiny margin of victory over Wallace and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Often enough, politicians presented crime in gendered and racialized terms. Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets, Goldwater declared in 1964. Given that the candidate connected the civil rights movement to mobs in the street, critics interpreted Goldwater as saying that white women felt vulnerable at the hands of black men.¹³ Nixon announced in 1968, 50 per cent of American women are frightened to walk within a mile of their homes at night.¹⁴ Women’s fear of crime, especially sexual violence, was powerful, but male politicians also exploited it, posing as protectors of defenseless women even though many crime victims were men. Not infrequently, critics in turn presented law-and-order crusaders as protofascists driven by an out-of-whack masculinity—charging, for example, that Goldwater was a counterfeit figure of a masculine man, namely, Adolf Hitler.¹⁵ Lawlessness was enmeshed with race, gender, and class, issuing a gusher of volatile politics that rained down on the White House.

But Johnson was not simply a beleaguered respondent to these pressures who sought to co-opt some of his critics’ momentum by adopting the crime issue himself.¹⁶ He was also an active agent in expressing and channeling those burdens. He came into office because of a great crime, Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and he agonized over the alleged criminality of people close to him. In the heat of the 1964 campaign, Walter Jenkins, Johnson’s chief of staff and longtime confidante, was arrested for sexual activity in a D.C. YMCA men’s room. In 1967, Bobby Baker, the party wheeler-dealer close to LBJ, was indicted and convicted on tax evasion, theft, and fraud charges after years of sex and corruption allegations.

For sure, LBJ did not engage crime as intensely as he did the Vietnam War and race relations, matters that presented him with almost daily crises. But crime worried LBJ in itself and as a threat to his efforts to build the Great Society, which he in turn saw as a means to combat crime. Like many liberals, he understood his war on poverty, publicly launched on March 16, 1964, as one way to get at the root causes of criminality. In the same way, he regarded civil rights laws as a means to quell black discontent that might erupt into lawlessness. As the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement put it in 1967, Warring on poverty . . . is warring on crime. A civil rights law is a law against crime.¹⁷ Humphrey’s 1968 campaign retort to Nixon’s law-and-order stance captured that liberal view: For every jail Mr. Nixon wants to build I’d like to build a house for a family. And for every policeman he wants to hire I’d like to hire another good teacher.¹⁸

But it was not that neat: LBJ, too, wanted more police. He repeatedly, if sometimes waveringly, backed new measures to deal with crime, among them the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, begun in 1965 and expanded in 1968, which funneled federal money and resources to local agencies (New Orleans police got an armed personnel carrier).¹⁹ Johnson also supported a major, impressively staffed national crime commission. Capping off the legislative record was the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, so sprawling that Omnibus was indeed a fitting title. That law was the federal government’s biggest intervention to date into the highly localized business of crime control, and it was so stripped of liberal provisions Johnson originally proposed (he wanted stronger gun control and better protection of privacy rights) that it took much squirming for him to sign it. Also, insofar as warring on poverty was equated with warring on crime, the instruments and resources of the former process were often redeployed to the latter one in the twilight of Johnson’s presidency and under his successor.²⁰

Just as important, Johnson employed the language of a war on crime repeatedly. That metaphor was hardly new, and it was easily lost in the blizzard of war metaphors LBJ issued—there was hardly a problem he did not declare war on. But Johnson used war-on-crime language abundantly and elaborately. He first publicly mouthed a similar phrase on the campaign trail, proclaiming on October 16, 1964, that the war on poverty . . . is a war against crime and a war against disorder. In the months after, he mentioned war against crime occasionally, and on September 22, 1965, he insisted that the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime.

Johnson escalated his rhetorical war on crime on roughly the same schedule that he expanded America’s war in Vietnam (major U.S. ground forces arrived there in 1965, and their number rapidly grew thereafter). In his special message to Congress on crime and law enforcement on March 9, 1966, LBJ proposed a long list of punitive, preventive, and rehabilitative measures, elaborating the war metaphor at length. The country would witness a unified attack and an immediate attack and a three-stage national strategy, with the local policeman